Published 4:00 am, Thursday, April 27, 2000

2000-04-27 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- An awful lot of things in San Francisco should be stuck underground, but I'm not convinced that citywide toll roads are among them.

Yet at the rate city officials are gridlocking the surface streets, I'd consider a fleet of municipal hydrofoils if it would help ease the mind- numbing transportation mess that has gripped our once-passable town.

Still, this would require a reality check for many of our civic leaders, who continue to act as if they're on the Good Ship Lollipop with 800,000 curly moppets aboard. I hate to burst their bubble, but unless they expect the populace to start tap dancing to work, they're going to have to come to grips with the fact that rapid overdevelopment plus reduced parking means four full seasons of driver discontent.

Short of trying to get whole families to skateboard to school and work, a majority of the Board of Supervisors and the City Planning Commission have embarked on a road of blind devotion -- adhering to a policy known as transit first that has placed city travelers last. The architects of this sprawling quagmire will be forever known as the myopic mavens that made San Francisco what it is today: Little Manhattan.

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Their contributions and policies will be on view today for a few hundred people gathering at the Palace Hotel for a summit to discuss what is rightly being called a transportation crisis. So far, a majority of the city's politicians have blithely ignored the obvious: Not only is there a ridiculous parking shortage in San Francisco, but there's not enough transit either. This is known as the check and checkmate theory of public policy -- and guess who gets to play the pawns.

"We've had a flawed policy for way too many years," said Supervisor Barbara Kaufman. "The theory was that if we didn't put in more parking garages, we would discourage more cars. Instead, we're losing parking spaces and attracting more cars. I think it's fair to say that the policy doesn't work."

Still, there are some bright lights shining in the fog of San Francisco. At the urging of the Building Owners and Managers Association, which is the host of the transportation summit, the Department of Parking and Traffic and a few right- minded officials, such as Supervisor Gavin Newsom, are close to announcing the opening of a number of satellite parking lots that should give some relief to city drivers.

One of the satellite lots they are pursuing is at Pac Bell Park, which, if it receives clearance, would provide thousands of parking spaces for workers currently getting squeezed by the self-righteous zealots at the Planning Commission and City Hall who insist on trying to get people on public transit lines that don't adequately serve them or don't yet exist.

In the next few weeks, Parking and Traffic is expected to release a long-awaited study on the city's transportation woes, which will finally give an official voice to this stunning piece of news: Yes, there is a parking shortage. Yes, parking should be tied into transit solutions such as access to shuttle buses, ferries, taxis and new Muni bus lines. And yes, city departments need to work better together to offset some of the worsening traffic problems.

"It's clear that the transit-first policies need to be modified to address the changing work and transportation landscape in San Francisco," said Parking and Traffic chief Stuart Sunshine. "And it can be done, as shown by the success in getting people to Pac Bell Park by encouraging them to take alternative modes of transportation and then fulfilling the promise to deliver them."

You might tell that to members of the Planning Commission -- again and again -- but it simply wouldn't matter. The doyens who oversee city development and demolition have seen to it that San Francisco follows a dead-end road, one guaranteed to make the cars pile up.

Last month, the commission approved a four-building development at First and Howard streets, the equivalent of a 40-story tower in dot-com central that is the biggest office complex approved in the city in nearly two decades.

Despite the size of the development and the fact that the area is already a crush of humanity, the commission took the 1,000 parking spaces originally slotted for the building and unilaterally cut it to 200.

No reason, really. Just because. You could see it coming, because anybody who can view a four-story Coke bottle as a great addition to the city skyline clearly doesn't understand the real thing.

"Transit first is a fundamentally sound public policy if it has a world- class public transportation system to make it work," Newsom told me yesterday. "But I don't think that description quite yet applies to Muni. You have to give people alternatives before you close down the options."

And one of those options in the future may be underground, because the Transportation Authority's staff recently reported that unless the city spends billions on road and transit improvements in the coming years, parking lots won't be needed -- because the streets will become full-time parking lots.

To that end, planners said one of the alternatives is for the city to consider building underground toll roads along three major routes -- with local traffic restricted to surface streets, while crosstown commuters are diverted to subterranean tollways.

It's an intriguing concept -- one that has been used successfully in places like Sydney and Chicago. It must have some merit, because Supervisor Tom Ammiano rejected it out of hand because it didn't accord with the city's transit-first model, which we all know has worked so well.

But it's certainly worth some further study or testing, even if it means excavating some of the underground tunnels Jack Davis uses to get around the Civic Center when he's not off practicing his brand of black magic in Sedona.

And these studies and tests had better be done before next year, when San Francisco will be in the hands of 11 supervisors elected under district voting, looking out not for the city but for their own fiefdoms.

Right now, San Francisco is engaged in a commonly accepted form of insanity: repeating an act shown not to work under the belief that one day the results will be different.

But we already know that insanity has a stranglehold on city politics. There still may be time to break the transportation sector free.